Recently, due to the wide spread use of the Internet, it has been common to provide geographical information converted to a digital form which was once offered in a form of printing such as books. A digital map service provided online, a navigation system installed in a vehicle, etc. may be examples. As such, one of benefits of the digitalized geographic information is to provide a variety of convenient functions for users through user interfaces capable of allowing the users to retrieve desired geographic information. Further, changes in the geographic information may be easily updated through remote updating services, etc., so that, in the aspect of latest geographic information, such digital data may be predominant over conventional printed materials.
In special, a technology of providing geographical information in a form of augmented reality (AR) which displays supplementary information, including computer graphics (CG), texts, etc., combined on an inputted image taken in real time by a terminal has been recently introduced. According to the AR technology, the technology may provide the geographical information for the user in a more intuitive method because it may offer supplementary information (e.g., a graphic element indicating a point of interest (POI), etc.) which overlaps visually with an inputted image, i.e., an image of the real world the user is watching as being inputted through a camera module of the terminal.
Since a size of a screen, e.g., a liquid crystal display, etc. of a mobile device is not large enough to display a huge amount of information, it is general to limitedly display only supplementary information for an object included in the visual field by using the conventional AR technology and not to display supplementary information for an object excluded therein.
However, according to the existing augmented reality technology, if an object that the user intends to search is not included in the visual field of the terminal, the user must change the terminal's displacement or geographic location in order to include the object in the visual field of the user's terminal. Further, the user may feel inconvenient to search the object because the user cannot get any guidance for a location or a direction of the object while changing the terminal's displacement or geographic location.
Accordingly, the applicant of the present invention came to develop a technology which supports the user to easily recognize the object excluded in the visual field of the terminal and effectively acquire information on the object by displaying information on the object's existence, location and direction with the inputted image.